While Earth does its own thing rotating in its orbit and revolving around the Sun, other cosmic bodies in the Solar System are also going their thing. Sometimes at the right time, scientists can observe new things happening on neighboring planets, like Mars and Jupiter.
The latest update from the long-serving Mars Express spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the Martian moon Deimos passing in front of Jupiter and its four largest moons, creating an eclipse. According to ESA, celestial alignments like this help them precisely determine the orbits of the Martian moons.
Fortuitous Alignment of Deimos and Jupiter
ESA's Mars Express arrived in orbit at Mars in 2003, and since then, it has routinely observed the Red Planet's two moons called Phobos and Deimos. Its mission is to track their orbits and understand their composition, particularly the grooved terrain of Phobos and the puzzling origin of the two moons.
The strong tidal forces between Mars and its two moons cause the latter's orbits to fluctuate constantly. For instance, Phobos orbits extremely close to Mars at only 6,000 kilometers and moves towards Mars, while Deimos moves away from the planet. More so, the brightness of Mars makes it hard for scientists to measure the orbits from Earth.
The alignment of Deimos passing in front of Jupiter happened on February 14, 2022. Due to this fortuitous event, scientists could accurately pinpoint the position and orbit of Deimos by measuring the duration of when the light from one celestial body is blocked by another or occultation.
Such an eclipse is extremely unusual since Deimos must be exactly in the orbital plane of the moons of Jupiter for it to happen. ESA released the animated sequence of 80 High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) images that show the bumpy surface of the small and irregularly shaped Deimos passing in front of the Jovian system.
Jupiter's moons appear small because of the 750 million kilometers from Mars Express, which is five times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Martian Moons: Phobos and Deimos
The two moons of Mars, Phobos (fear) and Deimos (panic), are named after the horses that pulled the chariot of the Greek war god Ares (Mars in Roman). According to NASA, both moons were discovered in 1877 by American astronomer Asphar Hall.
But unlike Earth's Moon, the two moons have materials similar to many asteroids in the asteroid belt, and scientists believe that they are captured asteroids. They also do not look like moons as Deimos looks more like a star in the night sky, and Phobos appears one-third as wide as Earth's full moon as it orbits closest to Mars.
There are no missions yet that mainly explored the two moons, but several spacecraft have snapped their pictures during flybys. Space.com reports that the first time was by NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1971, which took photos of Deimos and Phobos from afar and showed that these moons look like potatoes.
Other orbiting spacecraft that also performed long-range observations include NASA's Viking orbiters in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Phobos 2 mission in the 1980s, the Mars Global Surveyor from NASA in the 1990s and 2000s, ESA's Mars Express mission in the 200s, and NASA's MAVEN.
Watch the video below as Deimos passes in front of Jupiter and its four moons:
RELATED ARTICLE: NASA's Perseverance Rover Doesn't Just Search for Rocks, Dust on Surface of Mars; It Spots Deimos, the Tiny Martian Moon, Too!
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